Open access publishing

Share your research more broadly through open access publishing. We can help you navigate the UA Open Access Policy, learn about open access publishing options, and apply for funding to cover publishing charges.

What is open access publishing?

Open access publishing is making your research freely available online. This can be done either by publishing directly in open access journals or by archiving publications in an open access repository.

Some subscription journals will allow you to make your article open access by paying an additional fee at the time of publication; these journal are referred to as hybrid open access journals.

You can also make your articles freely accessible by placing them in the UA Campus Repository. Most publishers will allow you to post the final accepted manuscript.

UA Open Access Policy

The University of Arizona is committed to sharing its research and scholarship as widely as possible. The UA Open Access Policy supports this by committing UA faculty to share their research through our open access repository.

Open access funding support

The University Libraries and the Office of the Vice President for Research created the Open Access Publishing Fund to support campus authors who would like to publish in an open access journal but have no funding available for article processing charges.

The UA also has memberships with BioMed Central, MDPI, and PeerJ, which offer discounted article processing charges for UA authors.

Author rights

UA scholarly authors own the copyright to their books and articles unless and until they assign these rights to a publisher or other party. You can retain control over access to your works by managing these copyrights yourself. One step towards this is to only sign publishing agreements that leave you in control of the future uses you want and expect.

Predatory open access publishers

Open access publishing is supported by a variety of business models. This leaves an opening for abuse. Jeffrey Beall pulled together a list of possible predatory open access publishers who exploit the author-pays business model for their profit with little care for peer review or other checks on quality. In January 2017 Beall removed the content from the web and shut down his site. This attempt to create a black list raised a good deal of criticism for his unique criteria and judgment.